Jack Burton - Steamy Screams - Anthology of Erotic Horror

She tells me it’s not giving up. That I’ll always have what I want from her. That death is just the beginning, when you belong to someone, to something like her.

I’ve loved her forever—since I was five-years-old. Of course I believe.

Rain lashed the house. The thick, clotted drops clung to the outside of the misted-over attic windows, reminding Barry of sweat. Adding to the image was the attic’s smell, a heady blend of old books, musty air, and the occasional ripple of a man’s cologne, drifting up from one of the boxes or trunks entombed within the eaves untold decades earlier in the New Englander’s mysterious past. The muggy weather mixed it all together into a carnal, narcotic scent.

Barry had discovered the collection of grimoires inside a steamer trunk that had also boxed in a peculiar smell. Unlike the usual aroma of old paperbacks, library books, and yard sale finds, these exuded an odor of perspiration and sin. One in particular, a leather-bound volume with a mottled gray-pink hide, felt oily to the touch.

Five of the books were traditional hardcovers, at least in outward appearance, though written in languages he didn’t recognize. One, its indigo cover decorated in a spiral pattern of gold leaf, looked German. Barry had taken two years of German language in high school. Though some of the writing sparked familiarity, he couldn’t translate a full sentence despite retaining a decent amount of words and phrases. Another was filled with sexual pictographs and hieroglyphs.

The leather bound book, wrapped in a square of exquisite silk, held its secrets from Barry’s prying gaze. Age and isolation had conjured a waxy, pale pink resin from within, gluing the pages together. To force them apart would likely damage the book beyond repair. Barry sensed it was valuable; the most-valuable of the thirteen books in the trunk. It had to be. Simply touching its pallid, gray-pink cover sent equal parts excitement and revulsion through his blood, the latter leaving his stomach feeling like it had taken a punch while the former made his cock swell.

For the second time that rainy afternoon since entering the attic, Barry fumbled his loose-fit jogging shorts aside. His balls spilled out, hanging full and heavy between his spread legs. Bracing an eave with his spine, he worked his cock free. At twenty-eight, he hadn’t suffered such demanding erections in a decade. Since finding the books, he felt eighteen again and knew that with just a little extra effort, all he needed to do to get his cock sucked was to lean down, extend his tongue, and both of his heads would meet, an act both selfish and sacred.

Barry cast a furtive glance toward the book filled with hieroglyphs, opened to a page that showed a trio of rudimentary human figures, all male if the swollen genitals jutting between their legs were an indication. The three formed more of a triangle than a circle, the traditional geometry for an oral chain. Mouths were aimed at dicks. At the center of the human triangle, a giant inhuman eyeball sat open, observing. Barry wasn’t sure why this particular image made his flesh sweat and his cock leak. Memories of his one and only threesome to date, held in the woods behind his uncle’s house so very long ago, rose fresh in his thoughts.

Barry sighed. The warm breath teased the sensitive flesh of his cock, now so close he could take it between his lips. And he did. Mouth met tip. While one half of his body moved lower, the other wiggled higher. The head of his cock and an inch or so of steely shaft pulsed over Barry’s tongue. Only in his mind, it wasn’t his but one of the dicks from the woods. He’d gone down on himself regularly since finding the terrible, wonderful books.

Barry sucked and tasted his pre-cum, salty and bitter at the edges. Smelling the musty sweat of his pubic thatch and balls lit his skin on fire. The sweat… the attic was doused in perspiration and haunted by the ghosts of past sex. The kind of sex that had few, if any, boundaries. Sex that had teeth.

For a startling instant, the vision became strikingly real: him, David, and Jamie, naked on that tatty old army blanket someone had left in the woods, all of them high on the hot summer stink of their male bodies. There’d been many configurations on that long ago afternoon, though none spent in the wicked triangular pose that promised such intense pleasure. Between suckles on his cock, Jamie spoke in a garbled foreign language.

The itch in Barry’s cock doubled and then, without warning, his balls tightened, unloading the first blast of come across his tongue. Barry swallowed, struggling to keep up. One large shot slipped free of his lips and fell between the rafters, fresh ejaculation added to all the now-stale loads deposited there in decades past.

The stink in the attic burned in Barry’s lungs. The air had grown almost too hot, too ripe, to breath. Perspiration cascaded down his face and legs. Despite two climaxes since tromping up the stairs, one pumped directly into his mouth, his cock hung hard and heavy, wanting more, and his balls loosened up, aching for further release.

The books. He wanted to gaze through them again and enjoy their wickedness. Instead, he tucked his protesting dick back under cover and piled the antique books into the trunk. Touching the leather bound grimoire with the mottled hide and the resin-soaked pages again nauseated and aroused him. By the time he lugged the steamer down the narrow staircase to the second floor landing, his cock had unintentionally rubbed itself to the verge of unloading a third time.

Barry silenced its complaining and finished the job in the shower, where he washed away the external grime coating his body. Not long after he emerged, pondering the internal, the doorbell rang.

His name was Nickolas Kantemir. A dealer in rare books, he had answered Barry’s post on a blog about the collection in the steamer trunk. The lone sentence was both vague and promising.

I know what you’ve found .

Barefoot, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Barry padded down the stairs and opened the front door. Twilight had fallen, welcomed in early by the rain. Standing between the threshold and the dusk was a column of darkness in the shape of a man, its back turned toward him. The muggy breeze swept up, rich with the man’s clean scent, a mix of summer rain and pine trees. Barry sucked in a deep breath, exhilarated for reasons he couldn’t at first identify.

The man turned, and Barry’s next breath came with difficulty. A classically handsome face with sapphires for eyes, dark hair one length longer than that of most professional athletes, and a mouth too tempting to ignore materialized out of the shadows.

“Barrett Manning?” the man asked, his voice a musical baritone.

Barry choked down a painfully dry swallow and nodded. He somehow found his voice and answered, “Yes. And you’re Nickolas?”

“Guilty,” the man smiled, flashing a length of perfect white teeth, and for one blinding instant, all Barry could think about was kissing that mouth, and being kissed in return. Kissed everywhere, shuddering as it grew intimate with his flesh. Earlobes and instep, throat and toes, nipples and asshole and even places far beneath skin and muscles, places normally inaccessible to another man’s mouth.

“I’m here concerning the Langston Collection.”

Barry realized he’d fallen under a spell. Blinking, he regained some of his composure. “The books, of course.” Then a wave of worry crashed over him. He sensed his cock had grown stiff—if it had ever softened following his shower, which he doubted—and that if he looked down, the tent in his jeans would be capped by an expanding wet spot, damning proof of his guilt. Worse, what if the vision standing outside on the top step noticed?